


Death Warmed Up

by dogpoet



Category: Wallander (UK TV), Wallander - All Media Types, Wallander Series - Henning Mankell
Genre: Caffeine, Coffee, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-12-15
Updated: 2012-12-15
Packaged: 2017-11-21 03:54:53
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 661
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/593160
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dogpoet/pseuds/dogpoet
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The coffee maker was broken again. How the hell were they supposed to get any work done?</p>
            </blockquote>





	Death Warmed Up

**Author's Note:**

> Beta by [ariadnes_string](archiveofourown.org/users/ariadnes_string).

Every morning when he woke, Kurt Wallander had a cup of coffee. He didn’t eat. He didn’t adulterate his coffee with unnecessary rubbish like cream and sugar. He thought of the coffee as a component of his blood. Without it, he couldn’t live.

On occasions when he was called to a crime scene without having coffee first, he could feel his brain swimming, as through deep water, trying to surface in order to have rational thoughts, such as: _Where did this rope come from? Who ties a knot like this? Did the wine glass fall this way, or was it placed?_ It was fortunate that Nyberg always had a thermos of coffee with him. He had once informed Kurt that, before bed each night, he brewed a pot of coffee and put its contents into the thermos for these times when criminals were inconsiderate enough to leave bodies lying about in the middle of the night, or witnesses were inconsiderate enough to call in their findings at unreasonable hours.

There were other days when Kurt was called in to the station to interrogate a witness _immediately_. One morning, he arrived to find the coffee maker broken again. How the hell were they supposed to get any work done? It was like telling a lorry driver to deliver his goods without any petrol! It was like telling a teacher to teach without books! Kurt always flew into a sudden rage when the coffee maker wasn’t available to perform its duties in law enforcement, and Ebba would have to run out to get him a cup. 

Unlike Kurt, Martinsson always ate breakfast at the station. It was he who stocked the cupboard with grounds. Still, he managed to remain calm when the coffee maker was being recalcitrant. His skill with computers apparently extended to all things electronic, and he had, for years, managed to fix the coffee maker even when it seemed beyond hope. God knew there wasn’t money in the budget for a coffee maker. The bureaucrats in Stockholm had never seen a rotten corpse in their lives! They had no idea the tools that were needed: fingerprinting equipment, DNA processing equipment, latex gloves, and a steady supply of coffee. They had no idea coffee made the police more efficient and more productive.

Kurt liked it strong. He liked it so you couldn’t see through it if you poured it in a glass. He liked it racing through his veins, opening the doors in his brain, the doors that led him, room by room, to clues and leads and solutions. Without coffee, he wasn’t a police officer.

He and Nyberg had once tried to calculate how many cups of coffee they had drunk in their lifetimes. What was the daily average? Four cups? Five? It depended on how many witnesses they had to interview. It depended on the crime. Surveillance of Polish auto smuggling was a slow business requiring anything — anything — to keep the reg numbers and models from turning to complete gibberish after an hour. On the other hand, there were beheadings and burnings and hangings and butcherings that seemed completely inhuman. Adrenaline fueled the police through the initial stages, but coffee strengthened and steadied them when the real work was required. It helped the police process a world whose violence was quickly becoming incomprehensible to them. Alcohol helped them cope afterwards, but coffee got them through the investigations.

50,000 cups. At least.

Kurt wondered if this habit had come from his father, who always had burnt coffee on the hotplate in his studio. Coffee had carried Povel through hundreds of paintings that were all the same. Coffee and turpentine, that was who he was. He’d told Kurt that everyone had a landscape inside them; his was birches, and sometimes a grouse. Kurt’s landscape was littered with the dead.

The problem with death was that it lasted so long, and the cup of coffee was always over far too soon.


End file.
